Wednesday, 28 March 2012

Yale Silk Road Database

The Silk Road, as an interconnected web of trade routes linking the ancient societies of Asia with those of the Subcontinent and the Near East, has contributed to the development of most of the world's great civilizations. The Yale Silk Road Database presents over 11,000 images of major sites in the Silk Road region taken during faculty site seminars led by Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan (Professor, History of Art) under the auspices of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University in the summers of 2006-2010. Photographs included in this collection were taken during faculty site seminars in Gansu, Ningxia, and Xinjiang Provinces in 2006, seminars in Sichuan and Yunnan during the summer of 2007, visits to Liao Dynasty sites in Shanxi, Liaoning, Hebei, and Inner Mongolia during the summer of 2008, a program along the Tarim Basin and in northern Xinjiang during the summer of 2009, and a program for educators in Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Tibet Extension during the summer of 2010.

The collection serves as a multi-disciplinary resource with relevance to students and faculty working in the fields of art and archaeology, religious studies, history, East Asian languages and literatures, Central Asian and Islamic studies. The Yale Silk Road Database is sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies' Silk Road Studies Project through major funding awarded to the Council's National Resource Center Title VI Grant from the United States Department of Education.

Database on East Asia adds photos

A Yale University Library database containing photographs taken by Yale faculty and staff in East Asia roughly doubled in size last month.

The Silk Road Database, which has been available since the summer of 2010 and is funded by the U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant for the Council of East Asian Studies, recently acquired an additional 5,400 images to total over 11,000 photographs taken by Yale faculty and staff participating in faculty site seminars in East Asia. History of art professor Mimi Yiengpruksawan, who leads site seminars and initially amassed photos for the project, said roughly 20 professors have contacted her about using the images for their research, adding that many people "just like looking at the pictures."

"These are images taken while traveling to remote areas, and I think there is a lot of information that can be helpful in our understanding of contemporary lifeways in China," she said.

Carolyn Caizzi, an instructional design specialist in the Visual Resources Collection of the Yale Arts Library who oversees the database, said the update allows users to find images more relevant to their research.

She said she developed the idea for the project after she visited historic sites in China, such as caves with "amazing" paintings, and decided that she wanted her colleagues to be able to share her experiences. Yiengpruksawan, who said she took roughly 3,000 of the photographs herself, called the process of taking photos and building the database "one of the most intellectually stimulating" projects in her career.

Ingrid Yeung GRD '15, who helps catalogue the additional images in the updated collection, said she thinks the enhanced collection will have a "significant impact" on researchers because of its unique content.

"There is nothing out there, printed or online, that provides this amount of high-quality material," she said. "Nothing beats going there by yourself, but the photographs give you a close approximation of the experience."

Unlike many of the library's resources, the database can be accessed by anyone, as there is no log-in required. Yiengpruksawan said she emphasized "outreach" as one of her primary goals when she initially proposed the project; she said she wanted to make the photos available to the "academic community at large," instead of only researchers at Yale.

Yiengpruksawan added that it is important for Yale researchers to have access to research materials that are not widely available, such as those from Xinjiang and Tibet.

"We forget, sometimes, that there are worlds of culture that have been eclipsed by various governments for political and other reasons," she said. "We had a golden opportunity over the past decade to travel to places that prompt us to ask questions about our assumptions."

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Hans van Roon

About Me

My fascination for these subjects started in the '80 's by reading the book of Peter Hopkirk about the travels and explorations of Aurel Stein in Central Asia at the beginning of the 20th century.
Over the Silk Road through Central Asia, the Taklamakan Desert, Bokhara and Samarkand I arrived in the 13th century and followed the building of a world empire by Genghis Khan, his sons and grandsons.
His most famous grand son was Khubilai Khan and with him I ended in the Yuan Dynasty in the time when Marco Polo visited China and since than I never stopped reading again

Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0

Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0 explores Sino-Western encounters with a guide to digitized books on China published between 1477 and 1939

Yale Silk Road Database

The Yale Silk Road Database serves as a multi-disciplinary resource with relevance to students and faculty working in the fields of art and archaeology, religious studies, history, East Asian languages and literatures, Central Asian and Islamic studies.

International Dunhuang Project

IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet